Being in a relationship is tough work. However, being in a pre-marital interracial relationship as a Pakistani woman is just…I mean, you are basically signing up to answer intrusive, strange, and usually racist questions from strangers for the rest of your life.

I am a Pakistani woman in her 20’s and my partner is an Arab.

I wouldn’t change anything about it, but being in a long-term interracial relationship is often a more confusing and emotionally exhausting situation than you’d expect. People always have an opinion or a prediction about how lasting my relationship will be, how ‘real’ (?) it is, and what our hypothetical future kids will look like…It’s all too much. Anyway, here’s what I have learnt about being in an interracial relationship as a Pakistani woman.

This is not normal for everyone.

I live in Dubai and every third person in the room is from a different race or ethnicity. So, it’s pretty common to come across interracial relationships. But not every place in the world is as diverse as Dubai so when I step out – or step back in Pakistan, for instance, the concept of my relationship is still fairly “unique” to a lot of people.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with that but at some point, you just have to accept that people are going to always look at you and your partner as an “interracial relationship” and not just, well, a relationship. The most you can do is just answer their questions and hope that, at some point, they start seeing both of you for the people you are and the races we represent.

There is a lot of judgment, and it’s not going away.

There will always be that one person in a room who has a strong opinion on which is the ‘superior’ culture and will let the other one know how lucky we are to “end up” with our partner. Or ask us grossly stereotypical questions – and genuinely too – about our partner’s culture.

“Arabs bohat saari shaadiyan kartay hain” is my favourite.

Family gatherings will never be easy and that’s just something we need to accept.

To say we come from completely different cultural backgrounds and upbringing is a bit of an understatement. To expect our parents to always be politically correct with the things they say about the other party’s culture is just hopeless romanticism.

But that’s okay. His parents are going to ask me weird questions about Pakistan. My parents are going to ask him weird questions about being an Arab. The only perk is that no set of parents is 100% comfortable in English – the only mode of communication acceptable – so there is just so much they can convey before the language barrier gets to them.

We just gotta smile through it and laugh at the irony of never feeling more comfortable yet uncomfortable in a room full of people you love.

Language is so much more important than I had ever thought it to be.

I never really thought about it before but I have recently come to the realization that I ‘think’ in English. My partner ‘thinks’ in Arabic. It can be slightly conflicting when your partner and you have been raised to ‘think’ in a different language because there will be times you don’t completely understand each other’s thought processes or moral values.

But, hey, that is a problem for everyone in a relationship – not just two people in a relationship who think in different languages. Either way, making an effort to learn a language for another person is a fun challenge and a great way to bring two people together.

People are really really really interested in what your kids will look like.

EVERYONE (who isn’t a racist) has to point out that interracial kids are “like, really adorable”. And that we should start procreating asap.

EVERY. ONE.

There are things about each other that we will never understand, and that’s fine.

To some degree, we are all products of our upbringing. The food we eat, the sports we like, and the issues we consider important are largely influenced by how we were raised. This is also, of course, applicable to ALL couples but it’s just a lot more magnified when the people involved are from different cultures.

He is never going to understand my emotions during a Pakistan/India cricket match. I am never going to understand why the traditional music he listens to has to be so damn loud and not melodious at all.

We are currently arguing over a kahaani our grandmothers told us growing up. You know, the one about the mouse who helps a lion who has a thorn stuck in his paw and the lion helps him at a later point in life? He says it was a mouse and a wolf in the story he heard growing up. I respectfully think that’s dumb and lions make for better stories.

The only thing that really matters is how you feel about each other.

The random coordinates of the world you were born on, the language you grew up speaking, the kahaanian you grew up listening to – all of that is just the extra fluff on a person. We are the choices we make in life, the way we choose to think, and the person we aspire to become.

Matlab, really.

Being in this mesh of an interracial relationship has taught me a lot. It’s a process, but what matters is that we’re happy. And once you learn to tackle “log kya kaheinge” it all makes for some pretty great jokes.

Let me know if any of you are in a similar boat too!

I Spent Time With The Gypsies In Lahore’s Johar Town And It Was Heartbreakingly Eye-Opening

Here’s What Sex Is Like For Someone Like Me Who’s In An Arranged Marriage

Cover image via dailydot.com

It was like a scene from a film, the way we met. A blazing Sunday in June, two summers ago. Hereford train station. I was heading back to London from the Hay festival, and the train was about to leave. I leapt out of the taxi, raced on board and took the nearest seat in the carriage. It was then I glimpsed her, sitting opposite me reading a paperback copy of Mary Barton. As the train trundled through the English countryside my gaze kept flicking back to the woman with the wild green eyes and golden hair.

She smiled, and we started talking. Her name was Bridget, and she was a 30-year-old speech and language therapist living in London. It was easy to talk to her – she was engaging, entertaining and, thankfully, she did not work in the media. When she revealed she was learning Hindi, that sealed it. As the train pulled into Paddington I told Bridget I wanted more than a brief encounter; I gave her my number and two days later she got in touch.

I assumed Bridget would be nothing more than an uncomplicated distraction. Growing up in a working-class Pakistani Muslim family, I had been raised to expect an arranged marriage. I was the second youngest of four children and both my brother and older sister had had them. When we were teenagers in the 80s, my best friend Amolak and I would prowl the Arndale Centre in Luton and debate whether it would ever be possible to satisfy both our families and our hearts. I had grown up knowing that few things would disappoint my family more than my having a white girlfriend. Marrying one was unthinkable – beyond the pale – and so by my 30s I was set on trying to find someone who would tick both boxes: British enough for me and Pakistani enough for my family.

By the summer of 2008 I was about to turn 37, and emerging from a three-year relationship with a British-Pakistani woman; the plan was for some no-strings fun before resuming the search for the elusive British-Pakistani Miss Right. Bridget was going to India for seven months that autumn; in the meantime she could be my blonde distraction. I kept telling myself that our relationship was doomed, but the more time we spent together the closer we became. Bridget shortened her trip to India to four months and I went out to spend the last six weeks with her. On returning home I felt certain I loved her but did not know how to respond to my feelings.

There were so many challenges. I was nervous about having mixed-race children and worried about my cultural heritage being lost rather than passed down. I also didn't want to become the cliched middle-class ethnic minority who confirms his entry into the establishment by marrying white. Most importantly, I did not want to have to live with the scalding guilt of knowing I had let my family down.

I shared my doubts with Bridget and she listened carefully before pointing out that I was talking rubbish. "You were born into a fully Pakistani family and look how you turned out," she said; and for all my traditional upbringing I had still grown into a reasonably well-integrated and westernised adult. She also noted that my father, who had died in 1995, had, in his own way, been a pioneer: the only one in his family to leave Pakistan for Britain. Was it so wrong to be have found someone I cared about, and who cared about me? The more I listened, the more Bridget began to make sense. If she, as a white, nominally Christian Scottish woman, was not agonising about being with a brown, vaguely Muslim British Pakistani man, why was I so nervous about being with her?

Bridget and I had been together seven months before I told my mother about us. I had been trying to soften her up with broad hints about how I didn't think I would ever find a British-Pakistani woman who would be right for me. And then, one icy January afternoon, we were both sitting in her living room with a Pakistani soap opera on the television when my mother asked, "So who is this white girl you are seeing?" I thought about denying it all but decided on full disclosure. She seemed to take the news astonishingly well. She mentioned that it was essential Bridget convert to Islam but I carefully side-stepped that issue and instead pulled out photographs of my girlfriend in India riding elephants, making chapattis and generally acting almost Asian. My mother urged us to marry. "You're not getting any younger," she said. "Marry her before she changes her mind."

I went back to London, told a delighted Bridget and we had a celebratory curry. Some months later I took her to Rome and it was there, under a full moon, that I asked her if she would consent to be my wife. When we returned to Britain I told my mother, and she agreed to attend the wedding. She mentioned again that it was crucial that Bridget convert to Islam and, again, I changed the subject.

Although my mother had seemed relaxed, when I spoke to my younger sister I discovered that this had been merely a front, and in fact she was deeply unhappy that I was marrying a non-Muslim. She was not sleeping and skipping meals. The rest of my family were equally opposed. Living in London it had been easy, surrounded by liberal-minded friends, to assume everyone thought like me. In Luton relationships like the one between Bridget and me were rare and dangerously radical. My brother and his wife live next door to my mother and younger sister (my older sister is relatively nearby, in Bedford). The world in which they exist is largely made up of other working-class Pakistani Muslims. How would they explain my marriage to the people they would run into at the halal butchers? When I came to Luton, I would be summoned to family meetings attended by my brother, his wife and their two children, along with my mother and younger sister.

It was not Bridget they blamed, but me: the fact it took a white woman to make me happy was evidence of how far I had strayed from who I once was. "There's nothing Muslim or Pakistani about you," my brother said. "You can write books about how much your family mean to you [he was referring to my childhood memoir, Greetings from Bury Park] but we know the truth. The only time you even think about Islam is when you are in the media pretending to be a Muslim." Despite their fierce disapproval, my family would still be attending the wedding. It was important the family be represented, out of duty if not support.

Bridget and I set about planning our British Muslim/Scottish non-denominational sort-of-spiritual wedding. For the reception we chose the Garden Museum, a beautiful converted church in Lambeth, south London, that overlooked the Thames. With me being vaguely Muslim and Bridget vaguely Christian we toyed with hiring a klezmer band to play vaguely Jewish music, but in the end we constructed a playlist that included a generous sprinkling of Bollywood songs and 80s classics for me, and some more contemporary songs for Bridget. It was inevitable that alcohol would be served – Bridget is Scottish, after all – but the food would be halal and Pakistani.

In July Bridget and I went to Yorkshire for the wedding of Amolak and his white, Yorkshire-born girlfriend, Amanda Jane. Amolak had been dating her for more than five years but had only recently mustered the courage to reveal the relationship to his parents. His wedding was attended by his entire family and, during the evening disco, I watched as his elderly turban-wearing father took to the dancefloor, his arms draped over the shoulder of Amanda Jane's father. I was delighted. Such are the strange symmetries within lives that Amolak and I were both getting married within five weeks of each other to kind-hearted blonde women from the north.

Two weeks before my wedding day my phone rang. It was my brother telling me that my mother had changed her mind. The wedding would make her too uncomfortable; she simply could not accept her son marrying a non-Muslim, and she did not want to be the only one there distressed by the day. My mother had always insisted that she would not support any wedding unless Bridget converted but I had maintained that religious conversions are insulting unless they are genuine. Religion was far from the only issue; in choosing a white woman, I seemed to them to be saying that a Pakistani woman was not good enough. Both my brother and older sister now had teenage children: if they were to endorse my marriage to Bridget, how could they ensure their own children did not follow suit? My mother had wanted me to marry someone who could easily fit into the family, someone to keep her company, someone who was one of them.

As the day got closer I awoke every morning at three from traumatic dreams. In one, my brother and sisters appeared as ghosts; I could see them but knew they were dead and I was crying out to them saying, "Please don't die! I don't want you to be dead." In another I was sharing a bed with my older brother, just as I had when I was a small boy, but this time we were adults. In the dream I howled with pain that the brother I had once worshipped was not willing to witness my wedding. I sat in the darkness, my heart pounding as Bridget slept silently at my side.

I spent the night before the wedding alone in my flat leafing through old photographs. I stared hard at the faces, and wondered how the ties that had bound us together had unravelled. The phone vibrated. A text from my younger sister. How was the wedding planning going? I told her I was distraught about my family.

As we continued texting I realised my sister wanted to attend the wedding. I rang her and she told me what had changed her mind. She had been listening to Walk Like a Man, a Bruce Springsteen song about a wedding that we both loved, and had been reduced to tears recalling how once we had been inseparable. I wanted to relate my nightmares, but found myself crying as I tried to describe them. I put the phone down. Once I had collected myself I called her again. "Let me talk to the others," she said.

I awoke on the morning of my wedding day still not knowing whether my family would be there. There were three different seating plans, depending on what was decided. My wedding speech was still unwritten as that too would be influenced by who was in the audience. My sister rang. There had been a two-hour family conference the previous night. It had been decided that both my brother and older sister, as well as their respective families, were not coming. My mother would come with my younger sister. This, I knew, was only down to my younger sister's persuasion, for which I will be for ever grateful. "Hurry up and get on that train," I told her. "There's less than two hours to the wedding."

In the domed central chamber of Islington town hall, where the civil ceremony would take place, I stood waiting for the woman who would be my bride. Out of the corner of my left eye I could see my sister and mother. Throughout all the pain and sadness of dealing with my family, Bridget had supported me, and her family had been equally sensitive – their sadness at the prospect of my family missing the wedding coupled with a sense of powerlessness. And so it was especially moving to see Fran and Bob, Bridget's mother and father, sitting quietly with them.

Jackie DeShannon's When You Walk in the Room struck up, and slowly Bridget walked in dressed in an antique gold lace dress that made her look like a fairytale princess. The registrar spoke words I had written, Amolak did a reading of lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song, Bridget and I made our vows and slid rings on each other's fingers and, to a soundtrack of the Beatles' All You Need is Love, we signed the papers that made us man and wife.

At the evening reception in the Garden Museum, the hall thrummed with warmth and affection. Fairy lights twinkled on the trees in the garden. Flowers arranged by Bridget's mother adorned the banqueting tables, which were named after iconic albums. I sat on Born to Run, with my mother to my right. As she tucked into the egg curry and chicken jalfrezi, friends and Bridget's relatives flocked to tell her how happy they were to see her.

My mother had said she and my sister would be leaving at the end of the meal. In fact they were there to hear the speeches so I could thank them publicly for turning up. They stayed until 1am: my sister danced to Lady Gaga, my mother talked in broken English to Bridget's parents, and in basic Urdu to Bridget. At times during the evening I would stop and look on in wonder. It did not seem real. My white wife, my mother and me. All in the same room and smiling.

In fiction, characters go on journeys, they are changed by events. In real life characters often remain stubbornly immune; life-changing events can leave lives oddly unchanged. In many ways my relationship with Bridget resembled a movie – the chance meeting on the train, the wedding proposal in Rome, the turbulent will they/won't they of my family's attendance – but real life is not a movie. My brother and older sister stayed away on my wedding day. I truly believe that if they had come, they too would have been moved by the love and warmth that radiated through the day. I look back on their non-appearance not with anger, but great sadness for them and for me.

The day after the wedding I rang my mother. "Everyone was so friendly," she enthused. "The food was so good too. I had a very nice time." I don't yet know whether my family will, in the end, come to love Bridget as I do. I know that on a recent Saturday evening my younger sister had a birthday meal to which she invited Bridget, and that the next day she and my mother came to London for afternoon tea with us in St James's Park. I know that, when I asked my mother how she felt after the wedding and whether it had changed anything, she said simply, "The anger has gone." And I know that once the anger has departed, there is always a hope that love and acceptance can take its place.

Sarfraz Manzoor's essay White Girls is featured in Granta 112: Pakistan, which is published this week.

Saks and Suzie’s Pakistani-Palestinian-American-Muslim family

Fifteen years ago, at a crowded picnic in Redwood City, California, young college student Saks (short of Sakib) Afridi couldn’t help but notice Suzie — “a girl with the most beautiful curly hair”. He tried his best lines to charm her and they worked.

But as she smiled and the two made conversation, one thought tormented her: “Please let this man be a Christian,” she said to herself — only to learn that he is Pakistani, Pushtoon and Muslim.

Suzie was born to a Greek Orthodox Christian family in Jericho, Palestine. Her family was “ethnically cleansed and pushed out” of their hometown when she was 13. It was at this time that she came to the United States.

“We were absolutely forbidden from falling in love with Muslims…” she says.

“The Muslim world needs civil marriage laws… a lot of the time people risk death to be able to get married.”

Her “heart sank” as she thought of what her family’s reaction would be to her dating a Muslim. But it was too late. She was already falling for Saks; soon enough, the two were making plans to see each other again.

“I told her I’m leaving [for New York] day after tomorrow and we have to meet before that,” Saks recalls. He also did a “very Pakistani thing” to assure Suzie that he is not “crazy” — he told her that they should both bring a friend along and do a “group thing”.

The date went so well that he postponed his flight for a week later; the two met every day while he was in Redwood City. There was no turning back; hereon their relationship went from strength to strength.

“We started learning each other’s languages,” Suzie shares. He began taking Arabic lessons from a teacher he fondly refers to as “an institution”. She started to learn Urdu.

They decided it was time to get the families involved.

The job was not difficult for Saks.

His father’s job as a PIA pilot meant that the family spent a significant chunk of their lives in different countries, exposed to new cultures. Saks, who was born in Peshawar, moved to Libya as a five-year-old and went on to live in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the US. “We led a very well-rounded life, and half of it was spent exploring and figuring out how to cope with different environments and new cultures. I think that really helped us become more open-minded,” he says.

When he told his parents he has met and fallen in love with a Palestinian Christian girl they were forthcoming. It helped that Suzie made great first impressions on the family and “won all the aunties over” with an Urdu phrase, “Aap se mil kar buhut khushi hui [Very nice to meet you]”.

Suzie, however, did not expect the same enthusiasm from her family. “By the time I was 10, I knew that when a Christian girl falls in love with a Muslim boy she is either disowned, her mother-in-law gets a heart attack or she dies in an honour killing,” she says.

She couldn't help but think about a woman in her neighbourhood, back in Jericho, who mysteriously disappeared; it was later learnt that she was murdered by her brother because, “she fell in love with a Muslim”.

Fearing the worst, she broke the news to her family.

As predicted, her attempts to get them to accept Saks did not bear fruit. While she managed to win over her mother, one sister and one brother, others were not on board. “My brother was appalled at the position I had put him in; his father-in-law is a priest.”

Tragically, one day her oldest sister declared: “Suzie, we are disowning you.”

Her brother-in-law told her mother, ‘You don’t know how to raise girls.’

Suzie was devastated.

“It was very tough… there were times I just wanted to give up because they just couldn’t get over the fact that he is Muslim. But I rebelled. I said ‘I’m going to marry whomever I want’.”

“What’s killing us [Palestinians] is not colonialism or the occupation; what’s killing us is the patriarchy. Having to deal with the male ego is what’s standing in our way,” she says.

“There is this saying in Arabic, ‘kalaam al nas’, which literally means, ‘What will people say?’ This is the dictator in our heads which stops us from doing things,” she tells Dawn.com.

She believes that this thought process and patriarchy are the deadly combination that makes a family’s perceived ‘honour’ more valuable than a woman’s life.

“The Muslim world needs civil marriage laws… a lot of the time people risk death to be able to get married,” she says.

After a year-long struggle, the couple finally got married. At the wedding, Suzie recalls her cousin telling her, “Suzie, you did what we could not do”. Her cousin had been in love with a Muslim doctor, but wasn’t allowed to marry him.

Today, Suzie and Saks have a boy. She has converted to Islam and their son is a “Pakistani-Palestinian-American-New Yorker-Muslim kid,” says the mother.

The couple lives in New York, he is a multi-disciplinary artist and she is a standup comic. Suzie manages to find the funny in her situation and is currently writing a book titled I Married a Muslim and No One Died.

Both Suzie and Saks recognise that they could not have led this life in their respective home countries, but maintain that they are still “very much Arab and Pakistani”. “To love a Pakistani is to love Pakistan. You have to love Pakistan,” Suzie says.

“I think we both wanted to absorb and learn as much as we could about each other’s cultures,” Saks adds. The learning continues to this day. Being open to different cultures is the only way to fight racism, they believe.

“I don’t use the word ‘assimilated’, because it means you’ve lost something,” the comic says. Instead she likes using the word ‘acculturated’. “That is like you pick and choose, like cafeteria style.”

The couple has built a life for themselves and their son, despite their detractors’ predictions that it wouldn’t work.

Suzie recalls, “For the longest time they [her family] were waiting to see if Saks turns out to be the ‘big, bad Muslim on TV’. The narrative was always the same, ‘He will marry another woman; kidnap his children; beat you’.”

After years of being estranged from some of her family, the resentment ebbed away when tragedy struck: Suzie’s mother passed away. At her funeral, she met her brother who had been angry with her all those years. He hugged her and said, “I’m so glad you stood up to us… I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

A Muslim-Jewish marriage

When Amara Chaudhry’s parents emigrated from Lahore over four decades ago, they settled in a small American town in Appalachian Virginia. This is where Chaudhry was born and brought up.

“There were very few South Asian immigrants in town; they mostly came later in the 80s,” she says. Being different she, “experienced and witnessed a lot of discrimination from childhood through adulthood”.

She believes these experiences have informed her career choice. “That’s why I became a civil rights lawyer, and even within that I focused on criminal justice for so long, because I think that’s how racism is perpetrated primarily in the United States,” the Philadelphia-based attorney says.

She met her husband, John Kravitz when she initially came to Pennsylvania to interview for a legal job. Like many cinematic meet cutes, Kravitz and Chaudhry’s first interaction was on an elevator.

“It’s funny because I’m actually claustrophobic,” she says. But to avoid getting lost in the maze-like office building she avoided taking the stairs and met her future husband on her way up.

This was back in 2003, the couple finally tied the knot in 2013.

We ask Chaudhry if the differences in their cultures and religions was ever a concern for her parents.

“It was not something that my family ever mentioned to me,” she says. She adds that, “I have always felt as though John's extended family had a harder time with it.”

Chaudhry says that some in Kravitz’s family still seems “somewhat uncomfortable” with her and with their daughter, Laila.

She also feels that the South Asian Muslim community has been more accepting of Kravitz than the Jewish community is of her.

“John has accompanied me to several social events in the Muslim community, and I have done the same with him. My perception is that the Muslim community is very open and engaging towards John in these settings, but when I'm at a Jewish event, I feel like a get strange looks and people generally try to keep their distance. Of course, that could just be my perception.”

Chaudhry believes that even though America today is more diverse than the America she grew up in, it is still far from “post-racial”.

She sees this in her daughter’s interactions with some classmates. “My child actually attends a school that is incredibly diverse. Yet, there are still issues… She still gets teased for being darker than other Americans,” she says. This is despite Laila being “extremely light-skinned”.

Chaudhry and Kravitz are raising their daughter by introducing her to their respective faith traditions and more. “We try to observe all holidays. We observe Passover, the Jewish High Holidays... and Laila also attends the Eid services in our local mosque. But then since Christianity sort of permeates culture in the United States… we celebrate Christmas each year at my parents house; we stay overnight, there’s a tree, in the morning Laila opens presents.”

By introducing Laila to different schools of thought, Chaudhry and Kravitz have given their daughter the liberty to actively choose how she identifies. “Laila has boldly declared each holiday season that she’s a quarter Muslim, quarter Jewish and half Christian. Now mathematically that doesn’t work... But I think that’s an interesting thing because she wants to have Christmas and she wants to have Easter, so that’s how she declared it.”

A Pakistani-Indian love story

Sara* was born and brought up in Karachi, where she did most of her schooling at an all-girls convent. As she hit her early 20s, her father had a “great idea”: he wanted her to get married. After all, this was the age at which her mother had become his wife. But Sara had other plans involving further studies.

After convincing her parents, soon she was on a flight to New York. Somewhat unexpectedly, while working towards her Law degree in the US, she also found her now fiancé, Ali*.

Ali grew up in Mumbai (the city he still lovingly refers to as Bombay). Being the youngest of three children, he was always given preferential treatment. “You know those stories you hear about a mother who prays and prays to have a son? His mother did that,” Sara says. “Woh maa ka ladla nahin hota? [You know, basically the mother’s favourite],” she teases her fiancé. “Not that they value my sisters any less…” he interjects. This friendly banter reflects the dynamics and comfort level of their relationship.

Growing up, Ali’s parents placed a lot of stress on education. When he approached them about his wedding they advised, “Make sure you’re set in your career first”. Apart from that they were fine with whomever Ali chose, as long as he was happy.

This level of acceptance did not surprise Ali. “Back home in India, since the 1990s things have evolved and a lot of people have become a lot more liberal. The kids over there are having open conversations with their parents,” he says.

“I grew up watching a lot of Indian movies, so I wanted to do something dramatic in life — being with [Ali] is just the right amount of drama.”

In his observation South Asians who moved to the US in the 1970s or 1980s are perhaps more conservative than their counterparts in India. “They came here with the traditions that were in place back then and things weren’t as liberal. While certainly not all of them, a lot of them seem to be stuck in that era,” he says.

Unlike her in-laws though, Sara’s family might be a tougher nut to crack. While her parents have been more accepting, she foresees her extended family having a thing or two to say about the union. Not only is Ali from India, there is another significant difference between the two: she belongs to the Sunni school of thought and he is from the Ismaili sect. “My mom’s side of the family is pretty judgmental. I expect them to gossip, ‘Anita ki jo beti hai, woh Ismaili se shaadi kar rahi hai’ [Anita’s daughter is marrying an Ismaili man].”

“I grew up watching a lot of Indian movies, so I wanted to do something dramatic in life — being with [Ali] is just the right amount of drama,” Sara jokes.

But undeniably there is a cultural difference. Sara and Ali sometimes exploit this for comic relief. The first time she was meeting his sister, for example, he instructed her to bow down and touch her feet as a sign of respect. “He comes from India, so I didn’t question it,” the Bollywood fan recalls. As soon as Sara complied, her future sister-in-law was very confused.

The young couple knows that they will have to settle in a country other than Pakistan or India. “Now that we both know that we are going to be with each other, it’s going to be really difficult to move to [either India or Pakistan]… I think our best bet is to pick a third country,” says Ali.

While the couple’s cross-border love story may sound like a filmy fantasy, they have had practical discussions about how to make their relationship last.

“I’ll think twice before travelling to India, he’ll do the same before travelling to Pakistan,” Sara adds, “My sister is getting married in January, so he is trying to come for that.”

While the couple’s cross-border love story may sound like a filmy fantasy, they have had practical discussions about how to make their relationship last. For one, they decided early on that since their personal religious identities are important, neither would convert for the marriage.

They have also talked about how they would raise their children, “We’ll take aspects of both our [belief systems], and the focus will be on raising them as good human beings first,” Ali says.

While they agree on so much, they still find plenty to debate about. “[Ali] and I still do not agree on the Kashmir issue,” says Sara.

Quirky and excitable Sara feels her fiancé helps her relax with his “calming energy”. Similarly, in Sara, Ali finds his support system. “Even when things aren’t going great for us, she tells me to hang on.” He knows that every marriage requires work, but feels the couple is equipped to deal with the challenges life will throw at them. “We’ll get through them together,” he confidently declares.

*Some names have been changed

A version of this article appeared in Dawn, EOS on May 21st, 2017.

This article was updated on June 7th, 2017.

A Grazia article recently popped up on my Twitter feed, called “Why I’ll never marry someone from my own race.” It was written by a British Indian woman, and shared alongside comments from fed up readers stunned at the tone-deaf content.

The gist of the article is the author proudly declaring that she will never marry someone from her own race, not because of any internalised racism, she assures us, but to make a point to her community.

I’m a Scottish Pakistani woman in a relationship with a white British man

The South Asian community, in particular, does need to be more open minded regarding interracial relationships. I agree, times aren’t changing fast enough.

However, ruling out your entire race to stage a weak political protest is unnecessary. Not only are you denying yourself the chance to grow old with someone who will always get your desi in-jokes, you’re making a commodity out of mixed-race relationships.

I’m a Scottish Pakistani woman in a relationship with a white British man. We met at a mutual friend’s birthday party, argued over dinosaurs and have been sickeningly besotted ever since. I resent the idea that our relationship could be seen as anything other than the meeting of two nerds and I am certainly not taking him home to meet the family so I can push my “wokeness” in their face.

Interracial relationships have their own problems

As happy as I am in my current relationship, and while I enjoy introducing him to the colourfulness of desi life, it can be slightly frustrating at times. Imagine being funny in two languages and it just going to waste. Translating jokes that lose all context or having to give a mini-history lesson when discussing celebrations are just a few things that would be unnecessary if I were dating someone of my own race.

These things can be annoying and hardly negate the entirety of our relationship, which is built on so much more, but brown love is still beautiful and not something that should be looked down upon or dismissed.

This desire to glamourise mixed race relationships or claim they are the cure to racism needs to stop. Mostly because this narrative is often only talked about when it’s relationships like mine – a white person with a minority, which is a problem in itself. It feeds into the insidious nature of racism itself, where some people may think less of him or more of me. I traded up, he traded down. 

In a society where proximity to whiteness is celebrated, and even encouraged, mixed race relationships become dangerously aspirational. You only have to look at films and on TV to see mixed race couples that include a white person, but you’ll soon notice that same race or mixed race minority couples are a rarity. We see it often in much loved rom-coms like Maid in Manhattan and popular TV shows like Master Of None, New Girl and Quantico.

When we talk about mixed race relationships these are the kinds we tend to celebrate, as they’re the default. It asks the question as to whether these pairing serve any purpose other than propagating the idea that dating outside your race makes you a poster kid for diversity.

Dating outside your race doesn’t make you a better person

The old adage of “you can’t help who you fall for” is true. You can’t. It just happens. Trying to orchestrate your love life is hard enough without actively deciding to narrow the playing field. Sometimes you’ll talk to a stranger sitting on the edge of a sofa and they’ll say something accidentally charming and you’ll be smitten. That’s it. Ruling one race out – or saying you’re colour blind to love – is beyond rude and plain weird.

Race matters, and shouldn’t be ignored in matters of the heart, but it also shouldn’t be fetishised either. Dating outside your race is not a political statement, and it doesn’t make you a better person. To see things that way is ironically to reinforce the taboo on interracial dating. If we really want to break down these barriers we have to see interracial relationships as just relationships like any other, no better or worse than other kinds.

I joke about my relationship all the time because things can get absurd. But I would do that regardless of the race of my partner. I’m just obnoxious like that. Sorry, babe. 

Read more:

What it’s like growing up with an Apu for a father 

I’m mixed-race and was adopted by a white family: this is my experience